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Linux kernel 4.5 released with experimental PowerPlay support

Mar

15

2016

After some deliberation, has Linux leader Linus Torvalds decided that no true eighth release candidate of Linux kernel 4.5, but it is now after almost two months before the final stable version. That means that the merge window is now open to 4.6.

Tux (Linux logo) The kernel had seven RC and now has experimental support for AMD’s PowerPlay which the performance of newer Radeon graphics cards such as Tonga and Fiji have improved significantly over the -opensourcedriver amdgpu. Modern Radeon cards would now have to start in energy-saving mode and the clock must adapt dynamically. PowerPlay support is not by default but can be enabled by the “amdgpu.powerplay = 1” option.

The scalability of the free space of the Btrfs file system is improved. The file system keeps better track of the blocks are free and which to use. The cache that keeps track of the free space, do it in this release in a different, experimental way, so it takes less time to renew each commit.

The release also added support for GCC’s undefined behavior sanitizer. The code checks if there is no undefined behavior is in some operations, although these actions do not actually should not be in code. These errors can cause crashes or security problems. Under undefined behavior example is divide by zero or use of a non-static variable before it is initialized.

In terms of driver architecture is now supported ARM multiplatform after five years, or ARMv6 and ARMv7 for both 32- and 64-bit. The entire list of changes and additions can be found on Kernel Newbies.